Wintering with Amasa Ward 1889-1890

Amasa Ward, in the 1880's, ran a sporting camp for fishermen and hunters at Hell Gate on New Hampshire's Dead Diamond River at a time when native brook trout were enormous, woodland caribou still roamed the fringes of the watershed, and most of the old growth red spruce had yet to be cut. The author, Jack Noon, in the winter of 2003-2004, set out to relive Amasa Ward's 1889-1890 winter of solitude at Hell Gate by "undertaking a winter's adventure of late middle age and of isolation" there - nine miles of skiing or snowshoeing in from a plowed road - and to write about Hell Gate and its past. For several decades he had been compiling the history of the watershed of the Diamonds. Jack Noon had first worked at Hell Gate in 1965, when 28 men in a nearby logging camp were still hauling logs out of the woods with horses and two years after the last log drive had gone down the Diamonds and into Magalloway. Early in the 1970's he had helped build two log cabins at Hell Gate and had started leading Outward Bound winter camping courses throughout the region. The account of the challenging winter spent writing in a drafty log cabin where water often froze overnight celebrates an enduring love for a special place, its past all the way back into archeological times, and nearly half a century's worth of friendships made beside the Dead Diamond River.